skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The conclusion "this function is likely to terminate" may not be helpful, but "this function is likely to leak memory" may be extraordinarily helpful.

The reason that everyone brings up the halting problem in this context is not that we want to test programs if they halt. (Well, we may, but we're generally looking for other behaviors.) It's because for some behaviors, if you want to be able to handle all cases, then that problem can be reduced to the halting problem. Matt provides an excellent demonstration of this with array indices.

I'm confused by your restatement, because it does not restate what I said. You're talking about the halting problem. I'm talking about proving general behaviors in programs, despite the theoretical result that solving the halting problem is impossible, and that many behaviors can be reduced to the halting problem. The solution, as Matt explains, is to find ways to describe behaviors so they do not reduce to the halting problem. Using this technique, you still can have false negatives ("I don't know"), but you can guarantee no false positives.
> People don't really read things online, they scan. some things jump out, and only if you're very intrigued will you actually read the individual words. In fact, very few of you will even get to this line that I'm writing. The chances that you'll read each line decreases exponentially.

I only read that first sentence of that paragraph.

> Note that I've made all of my main points in the first sentences of what I've written. Did you even read everything, or did you just scan through and pick up on a few words? The attention paid to each line decreases exponentially as you continue.

Then I read this and went back through it.
Show HN: Jot = Text Editor + Inspiration Engine
>"very few people here know much about the actual science"

It's the same scenario with finance and economics, in every corner of the internet, including here. It can be incredibly frustrating.
It's either this or HTTP. I like the current level of abstraction the net has, I wouldn't like seeing it transforming in a closed platform on a single domain. I made radnation.com to be another place to be or thing to do in the internet, what we need is more indie sites like these creating different dynamics of use and features that are unique enough that copying all of them would be hard for a site like Facebook, then letting FB do one thing and stick to it.
Do you also state that there's only 50% chance of having at least one tails when throwing two (edit:unbiased) coins?
Ahhh that keyboard! by far the best I've ever used on a laptop. I think I started with a 770 going back almost 15 years ago to a t61 and the keyboard was rock solid. Switched to a MBP and still long for that keyboard.
> If complexity buys you nothing, then why make something complex? And, believe me, if you are thinking "Visitor" or "AbstractFactory" then I have already lost you. ;-)

I think maybe the disconnect here is that I work on products with a much larger scale than you may be accustomed to. My idea of complexity begins to blossom at scales past many boxes. For me, 25 interconnected machines is barely enough to register as a "big system". So perhaps I am just desensitized?

Abstraction is generally trying to find ways to mitigate complexity, not embrace it. At some point we need to have sympathy for the machines we run on to have efficient code, but at the same time you and I need to find good perspectives to write code at.

A more concrete example of this is my advice that people building distributed systems take a cue from Boundary and have systems rendezvous in Zookeeper rather than just using something like hardwired ports and /etc/hosts. You may think that "sounds complex" but it's actually a very simple solutin from our perspective as users of Zookeeper. It ends up being pretty nice the next time a giant storm takes out half of us-east-1 and you're frantically re-provisioning boxes to keep your service up.

Monoids are that kind of choice at the programming level.

> Complexity: when required; otherwise, choose simple. Believe me, I have learned this lesson over and over again during my 45 years of programming.

I think c_wraith's monoid example made the program simpler, cleaner, and less bug prone. If you think monoids are a "complex" idea, then my blog post has failed profoundly and I apologize for wasting your time.
Rosalind: learning bioinformatics through problem solving
Microsoft Solutions Upcoming Name ReBranding Changes
A quick 1-day build by The Chaos Collective -- it's an inspirational text editor :)

The UI is made to be super simple so you can focus on your own thoughts when you're feeling inspired, and lean on the incoming stream of content when you're not.

Type anything and see related words, phrases, synonyms, and images pulled up beside your workspace. Great for pushing through writers-block or putting together some lyrics for your bands next platinum album!

Enjoy.
"I don't know how you extrapolate that into some sort of mental illness"

Where did I say that he had a mental illness?

Ask yourself this question. If you were on a job interview for a job where the employer was not desperate to fill that job with a "body", and you didn't have some super stupendous big deal advantage, or credentials, would you think that offering that anecdote reflected highly on you? Or do you think it portrays you a little like a slacker?
Cool pics, but not sure how much innovation there is here. He takes additional liberties with the images, duplicating sections in symmetrical ways to create elegantly surrealist landscapes. It is alot harder (ironcially) to do large scale and make it look "normal." Ie. he's masking some of the real difficulty, one of which is alluded to in the piece: Since the light changes as he shoots, matching colors presents another challenge. Subtle things like inconsistent light make Going beyond "uncanny valley" very difficult. But using an "Alice in Wonderland" (hall of mirrors, etc) effect/approach helps subvert the issue.
I don't think it necessarily follows that more independent currencies will decouple our global financial system. It wasn't that long ago that a crash of the Russian ruble caused a global financial crisis. The US dollar and the Russian rouble are about as decoupled as you get -- not very. It's the fact that everybody trades with everybody that makes crises global and widespread, and more currencies isn't going to change that one bit. If bitcoin became a widely used currency, crashes in its value would impact other currencies.

All your proposal does is give the system a few more sources of instability, IMO.
You should have a broken, buggy POC in 2-5 days, something that you can actually log into in 2-6 weeks, and something someone would actually pay for in 4-6 months.
Maybe quit being a little bitch and send them your info? The fuck are they gonna do with your eye color and height?
I mean typical video games - ones you can "finish", or "win".

WoW isn't a game you can finish or win, and it manipulates players into continuing to spend more and more time in it. That's the part I think is damaging.
you admit you don't have something magic and irreplaceable

It seems like you're dismissing businesses that can do this as somehow not innovative, which is definitely not the case.

Many businesses are simply not designed as a business to benefit from growth through money (aka "buying users"). It's quite difficult to do so, even though we know it is possible, that others have done it, and that others are doing it right now.

Just because something is simple does not mean it is easy.
How we learned that Stripe alone was costing us customers
5 jQuery tips for intermediates
Strangely, we used to have a system based on "bimetalism," the idea that the currency is pegged to a certain quantity of gold and pegged to a certain quantity of silver simultaneously. Now it sounds like adding epicycles.
- I travel very little, but would already want this for standing in long lines.

- I wonder what their security solution is (an alarm if it gets picked up while in "following" mode)

- Clearly needs a wider base, it wanted to fall over badly

- +1 on the want because I'd feel like I had my own star wars droid
At least someone had the motherfucking balls to write this article. Good for him.
Yes, but most would argue that switching to a gold standard would make increase the amount of fluctuation rather than lessen it.
Rdio vs. Spotify Unpacked: Part 1
Green will refresh you and thus you will be productive n creative.
Blue will also be productive.
light blue and white for relaxed feeling.
Purple n rose will destroy men's productivity and any good company will lose all its sheen as it happened for yahoo.
On UNIX? Where?
Pretty great article.I'm always so leery of outsourcing work, no one can do it as good as I can! Maybe I need to change that.
Remote JavaScript debugging on iOS & android
sorry to side-track, but it looks like i've misunderstood american english. i thought "apartment" was american for "flat". but apparently it means "rented flat".

so what do you call a self-contained living area (several rooms - like a house, but it's not stand-alone) in a larger building if you own it?
Are you not getting it, or are you not agreeing with the author's point?
> In the theoretical case he has almost a 255/256 of doing it he generates a string in a truly random fashion.

An interesting result. Do you have a link to the proof?
They had a full page tribute when George Harrison died. But I guess being one of the Beatles justifies special commendation.
Probably a lot, but those people still get advertisements.
I have a friend who lived in a Honda Accord for three months. He says his goal was to save money but his friends (including myself) are convinced that he was just too lazy to look for an apartment.
The comparison holds. But this is not what I meant. Lots of comments here expose interface details from hacker's perspective and forget that they don't matter. Users dont care if its a keyfob or a key if it does the same thing with the same effort.

My point is that any interface has some abstractions beyond which you get only hacker delight in knowhing their inner workings.

For usability purpose you don't need to know there are pins or bits - just that they work.
When on the other hand, you artificially expose inner workings (menus) and _force_ the user to make note of them - you should not be allowed anywhere near a design table.

Designer's job is to make users life easier not to shout at them "you stupid you who don't know how to exit my maze"
Allow me to flip your methodology upside down.

So one article converted well because you actually had hyper-linked calls to action and the article was half the length. Well duh.. you didn't need to run an A/B test to crack that nut.

So 700 leads compared to 30 - seems like a pretty definitive victory for the first article, right? Not necessarily. Consider the quality of these leads. In one scenario, signing up was served up on a silver platter and as soon as the word "free" was baited, a lot of freeloaders probably bit the hook. Yes, they might enjoy your service and some might even convert to a paid customer when they can afford it... or maybe not. How many of them even need your service? How many just wanted to scope out what the author was actually selling because they are at the budding stages of some get-rich-quick scheme (a likely scenario considering the entrepreneurial, "how-to" content of the article).

I think your second article is much more brilliant, and barring the absolute absence of clickable links to your actual product, would actually produce much more qualified leads for you. I like that it talks about working with family, subtly suggesting the respect with which you treat your customers as well. This lends genuine credibility to your business and excites happy/warm feelings in me about working with you and giving you money for your services. The 30 leads that put in the effort to seek your product out after reading all that are far more likely to convert to a paid customer later on than the gang of what could very well be 700 hormonal over-caffeinated teenagers with big business dreams but no cash (gross hyperbole but you get my point).

So in conclusion I think yes, calls to action and clear succinct messaging is important - no secret there. But the content is even more important for the long term results. The story you tell should be crafted with the customer in mind that'll ultimately pony up the cash for quality service. I think you should've run with the family narrative, but included a few calls to action.
Microsoft got most of the grief because of security issues, which weren't dependent on specific hardware configurations ( at least, not always). Sure the BSOD was "normally" caused by a bad driver and Microsoft took flack for that, but on my single Windows machine that I have, I can't recall the last time I saw a BSOD.
Difference between hackers and coders -

Rule: "You can have at most 50 sub-directories."

coder-action:

#define MAX_SUB_DIRECTORY_NUM 50

hacker-action:

main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int i;
for (i = 0; i < atoi(argv[1]); i++) {
create_subdir( ... );
}
}

Plus experiments.

The difference is that the coder is just doing their job so they note the limitation and move on, the hacker is curious and trys to test to see if its a hard limit, a soft limit, a big problem, a little problem.
How does Google and Facebook compete directly? Also, why does working for a creative agency that does occasional work for Google merit disclosure?
Machine Learning in Gradient Descent
>"It is entirely focused on having people with no technical skills create companies that rely very heavily on a solid technical foundation."

Disagree. I don't need to know how to send/receive encrypted information, just that I need it. Someone else can get their hands dirty on the problem. No "technical foundation" necessary, just common sense.
Show HN: Phofinity for iPhone
Hey Y Combinator: Check out this new app that I just created. I hope that you enjoy. We welcome any feedback that you might have.
kind of. A typical trailer park trailer is easily 800-1000 square feet compared to these which are 80-120 square feet. Similar relationship to neighbors though.

Im actually founding a community similar to this right now. We have2.25 acres of land, and each house can have no bigger than 400 square foot footprint (though can be 2 stories tall). Land not occupied by houses will be shared.
I agree, and I think the ramp up time plus the intoxication of total absorbtion almost mandates some degree of obsessiveness that makes programmers more similar to artists than other types of engineers - there has to be peace and quiet and you have to lock into the problem and once you are locked in it is difficult and unpleasant to disengaged.

I'm not quite sure about the long-term solution. Normal family life has never been something that many artists are capable of (i.e. Van Gogh), and perhaps companies need to be more accommodating of employees that work two 10-16hrs bursts a week, rather than the normal 9-5.

Personally, I am in the "at risk" category for leaving the industry for this reason -- it is both burn out and lack of interest. I don't know, I still think there is some great code left in me, but it needs more challenging problems then I am facing at present.
I'm not sold on this post's content; despite my bias against facebook, it a convenient place to share common photos with friends, invite friends and acquaintances to parties, and it does keep me appraised of acquaintances' life events.

Can't think of anywhere else that would let me know that a guy I played club frisbee with in college recently got married. I never would have found out otherwise. You can argue that I didn't need to know that, but you can't argue that it keeps certain people on your extended network closer.

A lot of his argument is against the silly stuff they made for kids: farmville, frequent status updates, apps, gifts, etc. I can relate. Facebook has continually lost value since the year I joined, 2004, as a college freshman. This does coincide with their opening it to high school students, then the general population, apps, games, etc.

All that aside, what a fantastic URL! Slartibartfast would be proud.
Name a large and successful corporation that isn't.
What are the advantages of SCSS over LESS that Bootstrap uses?
Browser-based Electronic Circuit Designer
Umm. Really?
- the arab spring
- a father sharing his son's first steps with the world
- learning of the death of an old, lost friend
- telling the world you are ok after your hotel has been bombed in Mumbai
- watching your nephew learn to ride a horse.
- learning about steve job's death and feeling the entire world grieve
- discovering a new book to read
- trash talking your friends about just how bad the Montreal Canadians really are

Staying connected to the things that matter.
Remembering your life.
try doing some pivot or else switch to other ideas.
it depends on the ownership structure, but usually a condo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium
'Colloquially, the term is often used to refer to the unit itself in place of the word "apartment". A condominium may be simply defined as an "apartment" that the resident owns as opposed to rents.'
Thanks for doing the comparison. Admittedly, those are exactly the results I would've expected and goes along with each of the respective group's plans. Is Skeleton still in active dev?
A "condo" or "condominium", for something like an apartment that you own the interior of, or a "townhouse", for something like a house that is attached to other townhouses. There's considerable overlap and general fogginess between the two.
The GitHub:Training Web Site is a Thing
Personally, I'm more of a fan of Bulfrog's Theme Hospital.
I really don't understand the mechanics of when a reply link appears.

Anyway
>An interesting result. Do you have a link to the proof?

This is quite simple to understand. Just count how many files there are with size < n bytes (A), versus with size=n bytes (B).
Size 1: sum (i=1 to n) 256^(n-i) ~= 256^(n-1). size 2: 256^(n).
If you start pairing files from A up with files from B (equivalent to a compressing scheme), only 1/256 of files from B will be paired up.
The remaining 255/256 of the files wont be paired up meaning they are not mapped to a smaller file, and cannot be compressed.
Dude recreates first-gen iPod in-browser, won’t put 1,000 songs in your pocket
This Bikesharing Program Lets You Lock Your Bike Anywhere
Great to see an influx of people trying it out. We just added browser local storage in the last few minutes so that anything you write will be saved.

Hooray for not losing your data :)
I'm... kind of confused, to be honest. However, I do like the general idea: it can be great fun to let the mind wander while doing something like browsing Wikipedia.
Microsoft promises major Windows 8 app improvements before Oct 26 launch
I have no idea about those neighborhoods, but I've spent plenty of time in east Oakland without incident, statistically the 4th most dangerous city in the country. No matter how much crap you hear in the news it's not an actual war zone, most people lead normal day to day lives. From my experience people want to get out because the government services like schools and police suck, not because they hate their neighbors.
Better Before Worse or Worse Before Better
Not to pick on you—or anyone else here—but there's a funny idea going floating in the high in this submission and some of the comments.

If I have a large family, I wouldn't really reason with myself saying "You know, it was an easy decision to go with a van as a coupé just doesn't really have enough space." Somewhat different purposes though one can see the overlap, which there is.
I cracked the T21 lcd screen in college with an overstuffed backpack. The LCD backplates are not that hard, probably just plastic.
say what you will about the post, but that new FB commercial is an embarassing joke
I can use those "fictional" dollars to buy things, so the word "fictional" must be being used in that sentence with a meaning I'm unfamiliar with.
I find the idea attractive without any money savings. I find it very odd it's much easier to find a large crappy apartment than a small well-maintained one; I feel like it should be possible to get an apartment at any point in the 2d space of (quality, size) with the cost being some function of that, in reality the apartment seems to only be available around some tight distribution around a line in that space.

Moving into a bad neighborhood seems awful to me; for me, living in a 100 sq ft apartment would be only better than living in a 1000 sq ft one. I'm stuck living in an apartment with 2 roommates, a totally unused dining room and a very lightly used and unnecessary living room because there's no reasonable alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Compressi...
There are circumstances in Ontario, mostly relating to trying to terminate tenancy, where the landlord can't reasonably refuse a request to sublet the place. I believe the intent is that you don't get trapped in some lease when you've lost your job and have to move cross-country. The landlord is obligated to mitigate losses, and subletting covers that.

I'm going to assume "temporarily leasing my place to make $3,000" won't qualify, but I'm no lawyer. There are liability issues associated with people subletting, and I'm doubtful AirBnB has all those bases covered.
Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest Into The World's Greatest Shopfront?
Introverts tend to generalize from self-reflection, much like I'm doing now.
Open API: Real-time Nudity Detection In Images
Yes, that's due to google instant search - the I'm feeling lucky button no longer has a use (aside from visiting the doodles page)
The only website he lists that seems irreplaceable to me is Wikipedia.

Everything from source discovery, to unearthing basic facts, to hypertextual excursions through human knowledge is so much easier and more fruitful now, it's hard to imagine going back to the way things were before.
I don't really disagree with what you're saying. I just don't see the relevance of your references to menus. The conversation in this comment thread is centered around wireless keyfob complexity vs key complexity, and you jumped it with a non sequitur about menus.
Employees of kixeye accused of racist remarks fired
Jobs, meh. Hardly up there with Ford or Rolls & Royce, for example. Far more inspiring, far greater creations, and much more interesting companies.

Still, his products were ever so pretty.
While MAX_PATH is 260, most of the Unicode variants of the API functions allow for paths of 32,767 characters [1]. That seems like a decent length.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...
Energy Information Administration Releases API for App Developers
So tune it, get it right, then release it.
The author is saying that Facebook doesn't deliver a shred of value to any of it's 1 billion users, and if it disappeared tomorrow, "no one would give a shit." Tptacek disagrees, saying Facebook helps him connect with friends and local businesses. That's why he doesn't "get" the point.

I would say the Pages product is one of Facebook's strongest value points outside all of the peer-to-peer social networking. Small businesses don't have the time, energy, or money to host a custom websites and mailing lists to communicate with their fans. Pages make it incredibly easy -- deals, announcements, and advertising all wrapped into a single product.
Zynga stock plummets below value of its cash and real estate
Nanowires Show the Strain Limit of Silicon
Skeleton was updated in late June, so it's still being developed as far as I can tell.

We didn't know what to expect, in part because we hadn't previously researched the history of each framework. But you're right, the results are inline with each plan.